vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: a Sidney Riesenberg cover for the pulp Top-Notch Magazine, January 1921. This publication, from Street & Smith in New York City, resided on newsstands from 1910 to 1937, managing more than six hundred issues. Jack London, Robert E. Howard, and L. Ron Hubbard had stories inside over the years.
As regular readers of this site know, whenever our friends over at National Road Books get their hands on a particularly pulpish title, they send us scans. Yesterday, they e-mailed over a classic—the 1982 collection Weird Vampire Tales from Gramercy Press. Inside are shorts from some of the writers who helped build the foundation horror literature stands upon today. We’re talking August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Greye La Spina, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn, and many others. The collection also contains Robert E. Howard’s famous “The Horror from the Mound,” a tale set in the old west about a cowboy’s growing suspicions that a nearby Indian burial mound is something entirely different. In all Gramercy packs thirty stories into this hardback, all of them culled from 1930s pulp magazines, and they even top it all off with an illustration by veteran Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay. Highly recommended.
We haven’t explored the sword and sorcery aspects of pulp very much, so we thought we’d share the below Frank Frazetta painting used for the covers of a 70s metal album and a Spanish language Conan book. We doubt Frazetta’s piece, titled Ice Giants, is hanging in a museum somewhere, but it should be. For the life of us we can’t see how a Pollack or a Lichtenstein is any better. But maybe we’re crazy.
BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.
Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.
Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.
Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.
The Allende Meteorite, the largest object of its type ever found, falls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The original stone, traveling at more than ten miles per second and leaving a brilliant streak across the sky, is believed to have been approximately the size of an automobile. But by the time it hit the Earth it had broken into hundreds of fragments.
